The Hospital Report Card: British Columbia 2009, recently launched by the Fraser Institute compares the performance of hospitals in B.C. on 39 separate indicators of quality (such as death due to a stroke) and patient safety (such as a foreign body left inside a patient during a procedure). The indicators are shown for BC’s 95 acute care hospitals from 2001/02 to 2006/07 (where available), comprising more than 2.5 million completely anonymous patient records. The methodology was developed by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and researchers at Stanford University, and employs a risk-adjustment system developed by 3M. The AHRQ methodology is used in more than a dozen U.S. states as well as British Columbia and Ontario.